Kunqu is a music theater form developed in 16th century China. It makes a most sophisticated art both musically and literarily. It was very popular performance for the next two hundred years or so.
In 2001, UNESCO proclaimed Kunqu as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Since that, Kunqu has been promoted and regaining its popularity.

On May 5, 2006, a Kunqu music theater " A Marriage Proposal and Its Response" was hold in Michigan League, University of Michigan, presented by Wintergreen Kunqu Society, featuring the top-level artists in the world, Liang GuYing and Liu Yilong.

" A Marriage Proposal and Its Response" is a connected two scenes from a Ming Drama called "The Butterfly Dream", a story about Zhuangzi (350~300 B.C.) who together with LaoZi were the founders of Daoism philosophy.

The story is that ZhuangZi spent a lot of time away home studying the Way with his master LaoZi, leaving his young wife at home for extended periods of time. To test his wife's devotion to him, ZhuangZi faked his own death and then reappeared in guise of a handsome young nobleman, claiming to be one of ZhuangZi's students, had come to mourn ZhuangZi. He turned a butterfly into an old manservant to wait on him. When Madame Tian, ZhuangZi's wife, a new widow, met the manservant and found out his master was young and unmarried, she begged him to arrange the match for her to marry to the young man. Next day, the manservant came back and to respond her that although his master was interested in such a match, there were many problems. Madame Tian did not think all those problems were problem and simply solved them all, and she wants to marry him right away.


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